Mini barracks with sea view decks in Cayucos

December 11, 2022

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “Life On The Mississippi, 1969,” is currently on Amazon.

By DELL FRANKLIN

I drove to Southern California for Thanksgiving and visited my sister and family in an affluent and leafy area a mile from the beach. While there, my sister, brother-in-law and I went for long walks. And what jumped out at me almost immediately were the homes, and how different they were from what has been going up in Cayucos over the past ten or twenty years, like a toadstool crop of creative putrefaction.

As in Cayucos, this area is populated by people with an exorbitant amount of money to spend freely on architects to draw up original appearing homes with all the luxurious trimmings.

A couple houses on our walk expressed aerodynamic curves, like space ships and sleek landscapes out front. A two-story Spanish influenced villa-like home blended in with grill work of another that remind me of walking down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Another really unique one-story had two large Bonsai trees facing each other across a cobblestone patio with park benches.

The Bonsai were immaculate. There was a peacefulness to this creation, like a zen garden.

As we walked, the feeling I received from this neighborhood was one of people building their dream homes with an eye for individuality and their own yearning for art, like having a Renoir or Van Gogh on your wall. Maybe these homes succored happiness, because everybody waved and smiled when you passed them walking their dogs or working in yards or just driving by.

Then I thought about Cayucos, and the five or so homes that have gone up in my neighborhood over the past couple years—mini barracks with sea view decks. Boxes with balconies. No charm. No sense of the artistic, but of people with huge money and no taste hiring architects adhering to this tastelessness, pounding out these glossy packing crates with a wiggle here and a waggle there, but otherwise something that literally takes over an entire street and hovers over what is left like mindless bullies.

Most shocking? Cal Poly has one of the great architecture schools in the country! Can’t one or two of these big-moneyed people from wherever (maybe the valley) find somebody from the great alumni to build a structure akin to what I witnessed down south?

The recently constructed bumptious square of nothingness below me takes up a huge lot on which once stood lemon trees and a little white house lodging people who played music and held parties. The square, which eliminated trees and looms over the entire block, is empty most of the time and shows no sign of life, and cut off my view of Morro Rock and my neighbor Jack, three doors down.

One door over, on the next street, squats its twin (same owner, same builder, same architect) in another neutral color, and it is empty possibly 95% of the time, except on 4th of July.

Two blocks over on my street, where more beautiful towering trees were cut down, sits a two’story rectangle with a small deck and is possibly one of the top three blandest structures in Cayucos. It is so bland it fails to offend or outrage. I have never observed a soul visiting or living in this structure.

Currently, not too far down the road, something is going up that a couple neighbors have agreed is perhaps the ultimate architectural abomination.

I ran into a neighbor, who actually owns perhaps the only stylish, newly built home on the entire grid, and he asked me what I thought of the new beast going up.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

He is new to the neighborhood I’ve lived in for 25 years. I could see he did not know enough about me to be opinionated.

“Well…” he hesitated.

“It’s a fucking monstrosity,” I ventured.

He sighed. “Yes.” He nodded. “A monstrosity.”

On a tiny lot, the monstrosity goes straight up three stories, towering over everything and everybody, a rectangle upside down, with two rows of balcony and nothing out front. It is not yet close to being finished.

Often, tourists walk down this street and always halt before the burgeoning monstrosity and point and talk. I wonder what they think. My good friend Ethan, a carpenter and lifelong home builder, stood on my deck and admitted that in over thirty years of building homes, this one stands at the top echelon of obnoxious drabness.

But, but, well, I suppose the owners see the monstrosity as beautiful. Maybe Cayucos-by-the-Sea, unlike where my sister lives, or, say Carmel-by-the-Sea a hundred miles north, is destined to mar its uncommon and unparalleled beauty with block-like barracks and their sea view sundecks.

Like those things one witnesses when passing King City on Highway 101.